The Storm and The Hearth

By Joshua Bryant

In the tiny room, silence and self-loathing were more pervasive than oxygen. I look at her from the door, leaning on the jamb. She is two pale legs, bent, feet stacked on top of one another, toes curled slightly. Oversized black sweatshirt, the collar so loose her clavicles are naked in the shaking lamplight. Very dark, unbrushed hair, falling in heaps over her shoulders, swept out of her face. Her face. Two half-lidded eyes, deeply concerned with the sketchpad pressed against her thighs. One hand holds the page corner, the other flows with a charcoal pencil, easy like a black swan over infinitely quiet waters.

Outside, thunder claps. The house staggers, but she doesn’t.

She is frowning hard. She hates what she is sketching but persists. She’ll finish it. The line between her eyebrows tells me that. I could run the tip of my finger in that line, probing at the unknowable ocean tides surging below. I’ve contemplated her every day since I first saw her and never, not once, have I reached a conclusion. That compels something more than admiration. I could be afraid of the sheer weight contained under that unbrushed hair.

The wind turns the rain to lash at the windowpane. The sharp clatter of the fat drops, one after another, makes her blink. She heaves a sigh like throwing a boulder, snaps her head so that her hair whorls, and she stares at the window. I smile, knowing without having to see that her eyes are sparking alive. She won’t say anything, though. Only stare.

Beyond the blue curtains, a flash of lightning sizzles so that I can briefly see the outline of the streaming water over the glass. She and the storm are so alike, and perhaps that is why she hates it so much. The mercurial strain of sound. The ephemeral illumination. The black clouds turning in on themselves in a multitude of vaporous hands. And tomorrow, the ground will be muddy and the streets will be sparkling, but all the rest will have departed. While she will be in bed, sleepy with having slept little, dark eyes fixed at some point in distant space. The world, like the sketchpad, will await the return.

More lightning, more thunder, and I cannot simply stay inside wishing to walk around in her mind. I turn away and go to the front door. I take my coat from the hook, leave my phone, step outside. The wind wraps me in arms flooded with rain. The storm gasps before me, drawing me down the steps. It is like a vast, violently beating heart and still it does not capture the way she captures. Yet, I walk to the street and breathe it in.

I had always been in love with storms. When I was a child, I would let them swallow me, as I am now, for moments beyond moments. The implications of a wandering abyss, all around me, through me. It is all echoing, though dimly, that which I see flicker in her eyes when our gazes touch. The lighting surges within the impeccable uniformity of the thunderheads. And I am cold. I am my beating heart. My ecstatic breath. I am a leaf caught in the waves of this momentary ocean.

I move up and down the street, my arms going in and out of my coat pockets. I am soaked. I am pushed here and there by the relentless wind. I taste the falling rain.

Her voice reaches my ears, quiet among the gusts, but it makes me freeze in place. I look over to our door and she is back lit by the orange lamplight. One arm over her face, the other stretched all the way out to where she holds the struggling door with her fingertips. The impulse remains and I follow it, running over the lawn, up the porch steps, and to her. She takes me above my elbow, guides me in, slams and locks the door. She laughs and I do, too. But, our reasons are different. I am excited, trembling like electricity. She is laughing for me. Her clear, chime-like voice chasing away the lingering self-loathing she had until now distilled in the air. There is a towel in her hand.

She turns, smiling, the wind has taken the hair she had placed behind her ears and cast it swaying before her face. I kiss her, my lips barely tracing hers. She helps me out of my clothes, wraps me in the towel, and we walk hand in hand to the couch. I sit. She departs and returns with a cup of tea for me. She sits down, runs her charcoal powdered fingers through my hair.

We don’t say anything. We seldom have.

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My name is Joshua Bryant. I am a writer from the southwestern US. My stories have appeared on various episodes of Creepy Podcast, with another soon to be featured on Thirteen Podcast.